History Portal
Narrated history lessons for the classroom. Laravel 12 + Livewire 3.
The product of The Learning Portal (thelearningportal.us).
Quick start (fresh clone)
composer install
npm install
cp .env.example .env
php artisan key:generate
touch database/database.sqlite
php artisan migrate --seed
php artisan storage:link
npm run build # or: npm run dev
./scripts/fetch-public-assets.sh # pulls flag tiles from the live site
composer dev # serves app + queue + vite + logs
Assets not in the repo
Large binary assets are gitignored. Status for a fresh clone:
- Flags (time-map tiles) — fetched by
./scripts/fetch-public-assets.sh from the live site.
- Avatar 3D models (
public/avatars/*/character.glb, ~447 MB) and the
animation library (~391 MB) are not hosted online and are not
included. A clone renders avatar thumbnails but not the 3D avatars; these
assets must be transferred separately.
public/build, public/hot, public/storage are regenerated by the
npm run build and php artisan storage:link steps above.
Scene backgrounds
Backgrounds are sourced from the paintings corpus and Wikimedia Commons, never generated. Originals
arrive at up to 3840px and 1.7–3 MB, so every one is resized to fit a 1920×1080 stage and squeezed
under 100 KB as it is downloaded. Across the eight heaviest backgrounds in a real install that took
73 MB down to 759 KB.
Encoding is AVIF. At the same visual quality WebP needed more than twice the bytes. An image with no
real transparency has its alpha channel dropped rather than carrying a plane that says "all opaque".
Tunable in .env — BACKGROUND_MAX_BYTES, BACKGROUND_MAX_WIDTH, BACKGROUND_MAX_HEIGHT,
BACKGROUND_START_QUALITY, BACKGROUND_GRAIN_PRESET, AVIFENC_PATH.
Lessons built before this existed can be re-encoded in place. Originals are kept as bg.original.*
until you ask for them to go:
php artisan lessons:optimise-backgrounds --apply
AVIF film grain
The grain is not painted into the pixels. avifenc writes about a hundred bytes of AV1
film-grain parameters into the bitstream and the decoder draws the grain as it paints the image.
Baked-in noise would wreck compression — noise is precisely what a codec cannot predict — while the
parameter set is free and leaves a smooth, cheap image underneath. It also covers the banding heavy
compression leaves in skies and shadows, which is what lets an aggressively compressed backdrop
still look filmic instead of blotchy.
Measured here: preset 1 cost 111 bytes over the same encode with no grain, and in Chrome the
decoded gradient went from a neighbour-pixel delta of 0.0009 to 3.28 — the browser really is
synthesising it, not ignoring the parameters.
Encode a single file:
./scripts/encode-avif-grain.sh --quality 65 --speed 6 --grain 1 source.png public/images/source.avif
Render every built-in preset from one source, for visual comparison:
./scripts/test-avif-grain-presets.sh source.png tmp/grain-tests
Presets 1–16 are different grain models, not a weak-to-strong dial — pick one by looking at
skies, shadows and gradients at 100% zoom, not by reaching for the highest number. Preset 0 writes
an honest no-grain baseline to compare against.
Grain is applied to the colour planes only (color: scope); alpha is preserved and never grained,
because grain on a transparency mask makes the edges of a cut-out crawl.
Requires avifenc built with AOM — brew install libavif on macOS, or your distribution's
libavif/libavif-tools package built against libaom. Without it the app falls back to Imagick AVIF
(no grain) and then WebP, so nothing breaks; you just lose the grain. Anything that decodes and
re-encodes the file downstream — a CDN, an image optimiser — will discard the grain parameters, so
check the asset as actually served.
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